September 1, 2022
September was another block in my Calendar series that I wasn’t happy with so I went back to the same designer as I picked for August. This block was much easier to put together and the results are much better.
Imagine Kathryn slicing her chicken dinner on her cutting board with a matching chicken below.
When Stacia, Deloise and I were planning our Panorama trip both of them were going to work on a pattern that would use fabrics from Mum’s stash. I have always planned a second quilt with the scraps of her fabric that I still had. Some time ago I purchased a set of templates for making scrap quilts and I thought I’d make use of them.
I started cutting but it soon became clear that I wasn’t going to have enough variety in the fabric to give me the designs that I was hoping for. But I had enough yardage to use in a 3-Yard quilt so I picked a pattern and finished the top when we were together.
I have tried in the past to do a pieced backing and I was never very happy with the results. But a fellow Guild member had been doing something called crumb quilting where you take the tiniest pieces, stitch them together, stitch them to more tiny pieces and finally, after a long time, you end up with enough fabric to make a block. I started doing that but realized it was going to take forever so I gave up.
I still had a few larger pieces of Mum’s fabric so I started with that and eventually made up enough blocks to do a pieced backing. I’m so pleased with the results; to me it looks so much like the patchwork quilts that Mum made.
I used my go-to star pattern for the squares and the mattress stitch to outline those blocks. I used a wider mattress stitch for the diagonals but they didn’t direct the eye to the diagonal as much as I expected. I used a straight-line spiral in the half of the half-square triangle that was opposite the diagonal.
This purple fabric is my favourite.
I didn’t particularly care for the calendar block in the series I’ve been following so I found my own – a Rubik’s Cube. I was really looking forward to doing this block but it turned out to be much harder than I anticipated. And in spite of getting the Y-seam all lined up the block is a bit wonky. When I checked with Deloise she suggested I might be able to “quilt it into submission” and that is exactly what I did.
It isn’t perfect but Alex likes it so what more could I want.
During the pandemic our Guild had an online Trunk Show with Darcy Hunter, a Fredericton quilt artist. She teaches online workshops but her description of the process was good enough that I thought I could figure it out with the help of Stacia and Deloise. So I bought a pattern for myself and different ones for them and we worked on them during our sewing session at Panorama.
I’m pleased with the way this turned out but, I admit, my pattern was the easiest of the three. The black lines are thread painted which I’ve only done once before. We used a facing to finish off the pieces; I’ve used that method previously but it was new to Stacia and Deloise. It’s not often I try something they haven’t!